Donald Trump vastly underestimates job gains under Joe Biden

Just days after being arraigned for his third indictment, former President Donald Trump gave a speech to supporters in South Carolina. 

Trump, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, took aim at President Joe Biden’s record for job creation, arguing that Biden’s achievements paled compared with his own.

"During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office we created 4.9 million new jobs," Trump said Aug. 5.

We have previously fact-checked Biden for exaggerating the scale of job gains on his watch, but none of Biden’s statements were as far off base as Trump’s. 

When Trump took office in January 2017, the U.S. had 145.6 million nonfarm jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ standard measurement for job counting. After Trump’s first 30 months — the same number of months that Biden has been in office — the number of jobs had risen to 150.8 million. 

That’s an increase of about 5.2 million jobs, or a bit higher than the 4.9 million Trump described in South Carolina.

Using this methodology, Trump was much further off base with Biden’s numbers.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S had almost 143 million nonfarm jobs. By Biden’s 30th month in office — June 2023 — the number of nonfarm jobs had risen to 156.2 million. 

That’s an increase of 13.2 million jobs, or more than six times as big as the 2.1 million jobs Trump referenced in his speech.

A month-by-month comparison of job gains under the two administrations shows that Trump beat Biden for nonfarm job gains in only two of their first 30 months.

A president’s role in influencing economic outcomes is limited. Global factors, such as wars and oil shocks, can shift economic outcomes. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic had a major impact on the economy, complicating a direct Trump-versus-Biden comparison on job gains.

Still, calculated the conventional way, Trump’s statement is wrong both on the specific numbers and on which president presided over bigger job gains.

Trump’s campaign team told PolitiFact that they characterize any jobs that returned after the coronavirus pandemic as jobs that Biden shouldn’t be able to take credit for. 

This means that roughly 11 million of the 13.2 million-job increase on Biden’s watch are simply "workers returning from pandemic layoffs" rather than jobs actually created, the campaign said in a statement.

"Any numbers you see that are economically positive in the Biden administration are because they are running on the fumes of what we created years prior to their taking office," Trump said in a speech that his campaign highlighted in its response to our request.

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Economists say there are legitimate reasons to provide asterisks for job gains and losses caused by the pandemic, the emergence of which was beyond any president’s control. But Trump’s approach treats the two presidents unequally, and in a self-serving way.

On the one hand, Trump’s use of a 30-month time frame effectively absolves his jobs record from any impact from the pandemic; over his whole term, Trump ended up more than 3.1 million jobs in the hole because of pandemic employment losses. On the other hand, using Trump’s method, Biden gets walloped with the responsibility for major job losses from the pandemic.

Trump’s approach says that "everything that was bad is Biden's fault, whereas everything that is good would have happened anyhow, and Biden doesn't deserve credit," said Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, agreed, saying he finds it "ludicrous to argue that Trump should be credited with 100% responsibility for 100% of the job gains" for the first 30 months of his tenure "while Biden should be assigned 0% of the responsibility for the recovery of those lost jobs during his term in office."

"The recovery of payroll employment once President Biden took office has been strong and surprisingly persistent," Burtless said. "Should we give credit to the Biden administration for the healthy state of the current job market? It deserves some credit, certainly."

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum, said he initially had  sympathy for Trump’s assertion, but the more he thought about it, he found no reason to treat the pandemic differently from any previous economic shock, such as the 1970s oil embargo.

"Stuff happens," he said.

Trump said, "During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office we created 4.9 million new jobs."

Calculated in the conventional fashion, Trump is wrong, both on the numbers and on who oversaw more job gains. During Trump’s first 30 months, the number of nonfarm jobs rose by 5.2 million. But during Biden’s first 30 months, the number rose by a much larger 13.2 million.

Trump’s campaign justified his accounting by saying that Biden doesn’t deserve some 11 million jobs gained during the post-pandemic bounceback. But Trump’s method isn’t evenhanded, because it shifts all the employment damage from the pandemic to Biden while not acknowledging pandemic job losses under Trump.

We rate the statement False.